A kid in King Jay’s court: My life with the Latin Kings

Jay, as I call him, grew up in New York City and started hanging around ALKQN members right as the organization shifted. The more time we spent together the more of his story trickled out, one that deserves its own book rather than a quick summary.

Not long after, Jay was shot multiple times and was told he was lucky he survived. From his hospital bed, Jay said he forgave his assailant and that nothing would stand in the way of peace. Besides his charismatic nature and authoritative presence, who wouldn’t be drawn to that determination and commitment to principles?

It’s a story I grew familiar with reciting. After the newspaper article, I invited Jay and other ALKQN members on campus so I could interview them on Guilford’s radio station. The relationship continued to grow as I set up speaking engagements in classes and worked alongside Jay as part of a nucleus at the Beloved Community Center to organize a Peace, Unity & Justice march that fall.

There were close to 100 charges in all from Greensboro police, many of them hanging around Jay’s neck, but very few convictions. Analysis by (my now colleague) Jordan Green in 2010 showed that the rate was under 20 percent and only 10.8 percent for felonies, much lower than the county average of 65.4 percent conviction rate on felony charges. To those who knew Jay, myself included, it was a clear case of harassment and frivolous charges.

I grew closer and closer to the ALKQN over time. I developed a friendship with Jay, and a more casual one with other Kings. I knew them by their King names, some of which were the source of great amusement to my college friends — Squirrel, Toasty and Spanky may have been the favorite monikers.

In one of our first interactions, Jay asked me to show a Queen around campus and introduce her to professors to help fuel her drive to apply to college. At a talk to a grad-school class at UNCG, Spanky told students about how he used to be a petty criminal until he met Jay, who turned him around. By banding together and living somewhat collectively, Jay helped this crew of misfits pool their resources while organizing in various community initiatives.

The whole thing made my parents pretty nervous. Once they visited and they invited Jay and Bam to join us for dinner at Binh Minh, a Vietnamese restaurant near campus. They had a lot of questions about why anyone would hold onto the vestiges of a criminal organization, and were concerned that if police were targeting Jay as I said, that I’d be caught up in it eventually. But after meeting King Jay they gave me their tacit support, while encouraging me to be careful.

I just kept drawing closer.

I was standing in the middle of a Dumpster when I got the phone call.

The police were slowly crawling up and down Terrell Street off of Freeman Mill Road, where Jay lived in a house with a few other Kings, and he feared a baseless raid was imminent. It was right at the end of the school year and a friend and I were going through a Dumpster outside of a freshman dorm at Guilford hoping to find something hastily thrown away by students as they moved out. In years past we had salvaged couches and even uncovered a shoebox with a few full cans of beer inside.

We left some records and the other items we had found and split, pulling up across the street from Jay’s yellow house with a camera at the ready to document the anticipated raid. The street was quiet, eerily so, and we couldn’t see any police cars. So we waited.

None ever materialized — at least not that night.

Once Jay commented that he knew I liked hanging out with them because it made me look tough and helped me get girls. How could it not when I walked around campus with a posse, which initially included the aptly named Bear and Menace a few times? I denied his friendly teasing, but spent a lot of time after that thinking about my subconscious motivations. Was I hanging out with these guys for the right reasons or did I just want to seem cool, or down, or rougher around the edges?

We had worked to change the narrative, and to bring to light what the ALKQN was really about, but it just didn’t seem to be making a big enough impact. We needed a bigger plan.

That plan came one day after I returned from Central America, while we were sitting in the office at the Beloved Community Center with its director, Rev. Nelson Johnson, and organizer Wesley Morris. I forget the specifics of who came up with the idea, but we left the discussion with a decision: Jay would run for city council.

The most memorable moment of the campaign was also one of the most unexpected. It was August 2009, at big outdoor concert in Hamburger Square downtown Greensboro, where we planned to distribute a bunch of fliers. As we waited for Hype and others to arrive with Jay’s daughters, we noticed a few off-duty officers working the event and eying Jay.

He recognized one cop as an officer who frequently gave them trouble and had kicked in his door before, so we braced for a confrontation. Jay and I were with his girlfriend and a friend of mine from school, and so my friend and I agreed we would start filming when the officers approached. Another officer surreptitiously took my picture, quickly pretending to talk on her phone when she realized I was looking at her.

I saw the Kings when they arrived, and when the police saw me wave at them the officers started moving briskly towards them. Our cameras came out immediately as we all walked over.

I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow account, especially since my footage is on YouTube, but Jay was ultimately arrested without cause. Police claimed to the TV news reporters and later in court that Latin Kings were throwing up gang signs to provoke Bloods who were there. They could’ve only been talking about a King waving back at me.

After the arrest Jay was put on a 6 p.m. curfew despite the minimal charge, an action that is usually reserved for minors or serious offenders and one that we took as an affront to his city council campaign.

The whole incident, like most of the ALKQN’s interactions with the police, reeked of BS. At trial, an officer testified that the camera I used to film the incident was one of those bulky, shoulder-mounted behemoths that TV news crews use. It was actually a small digital camera that fit in my pocket, one that I kept there daily next to my wallet so that I could document the campaign for the Cornell for Council website I had created.

Just another example of police lying with an ulterior motive, I thought. I called the police department the night of his arrest and asked to file a complaint. Nobody ever followed up with me about it. I shouldn’t be surprised, I remember telling friends.

I accrued countless other stories in the thousands of hours I spent with King Jay, like when he invited me over for Christmas dinner and Hype was pulled over for speeding on the way to the store. I can still remember how good the macaroni and cheese tasted, and Hype’s bashful look when Jay asked if he had actually been driving over the speed limit. He said something like, “Yes, brother Jay, I’m sorry.”

We traveled to Detroit together for the US Social Forum, a sprawling conference for left-wing social movements. By then I worked at the Beloved Community Center and shared a hotel room with a few Kings, and I was there when Jay suffered from a heart attack at the convention center downtown after the long opening march.

He had been asked to speak on a panel about the ALKQN’s organizing work, but he missed the rest of the conference and sent me in his stead.

After graduating from Guilford College with a degree in history — a major I picked out of interest and convenience rather than any career aspirations — I worked for another four months at the Beloved Community Center as a contract worker.

When the gig ended I had planned a cross-country road trip with three friends. My parents had moved to the San Francisco bay area and it was time to give the big white family minivan that I had been driving here to my sister, who was also in the Golden State attending college.

I returned unsure of what I wanted to do but with a diminishing interest in community organizing as a profession — I didn’t want to mold my politics to that of an organization, in part — and took two unpaid journalism internships. My closeness to King Jay had waned, but when my girlfriend at the time wanted to shoot a photo project on the ALKQN, I used it as a chance to reconnect.

Still, as I moved more and more towards journalism, especially after starting a part-time job as a reporter, my orbit crossed less with Jay as I stopped planning and participating in protests. In 2011 he made another bid for city council, with several of my friends helping his run against conservative Trudy Wade in District 5, but I kept my distance. Even if I hadn’t been trying to maintain an ethical distance as a journalist, I was burned out on the nonstop organizing cycle. I still wanted to make a difference, but my means had changed.

One of our biggest arguments came when he appealed the conviction stemming from his arrest I had filmed at the concert. It’s probably fair to say that I was considered his star witness for the case, but his lawyer didn’t reach out to me leading up to trial. I received a call the day of trial and was told they needed me that afternoon, and it wasn’t until after I had left an internship at a newspaper to drive to court that the lawyer called back and said I didn’t have to testify until another day, if at all that week.

Some of the minutia of the timeline eludes me now, years later, but I remember being at the Durham office of North Carolina Public Radio. It was the final day of a different journalism internship I was doing there. I checked my phone (which was on silent) during a bathroom break and realized I had missed several calls from Jay. His lawyer urgently needed me to come testify, I learned, and out of stubborn principle, I refused.

We fought bitterly, but I didn’t budge. I was exhausted and felt like I had routinely put my needs second. I had repeatedly called the lawyer to figure out when I would be needed with no response and made clear the lone day I could not be available.

To Jay, the instance was emblematic of me choosing myself, or a career, over him. In retrospect I wish we had somehow sorted things out about the trial before it came to a head, though I’m not sure how. We eventually made good, agreeing that we were both actually mad at his lawyer who Jay hadn’t really worked with before. Yet things didn’t really return to normal, and the incident set the stage for future tension.

We were both right, to an extent, and we were too bull-headed to deal with it. I figured I’d let time sort it out and revisit our friendship later.

Friends lived across the street from Jay’s house and quickly alerted me when a dragnet of FBI and other agents descended on his home. By the time I arrived, camera in hand, Jay was already gone.

My testimony can’t have lasted very long, but even though I was telling the truth I remember my leg shaking and my hands sweating as the prosecutor cross-examined me. I didn’t know until right before I was called that I would be testifying at all. In fact a federal agent working for the prosecution had called my office and, without identifying himself, tried to find out if I would be testifying, acting as if he were part of the team of public defenders.

We’re able to communicate through an email system for inmates called CorrLinks, which is free for people on the outside but costs him based on time. Our relationship has waxed and waned, connecting more through the support I can provide his daughters who are in middle and high school with things like rides to softball practice.

I’ve only managed to travel up to the prison to see him twice, most recently the weekend after Christmas with a friend and Jay’s daughters so they could see him. After making it through the seemingly arbitrary and ever-changing dress code at the front, a guard escorts visitors into a large room in spurts, where some physical contact with inmates is allowed as people sit around low, plastic tables.

He’s a proud man, as he should be. I know that he, like myself, doesn’t find fault in himself, but in the system. I alternate between feeling that the police, the courts and the systems behind them are too thick to understand who Jay is and what he was trying to do; and conversely feeling like they knew exactly what Jay symbolized and that’s why they needed to put him away at all costs.

A strong Latino man who came from the bottom of the bottom and could unite street gangs into a political force, a man with a righteous disrespect for authority who could also pull together black preachers and a white Jewish kid from up North. That kind of unauthorized power is threatening, especially if one of its primary objectives is challenging abusive police and morally bankrupt politicians, whose power he routinely didn’t recognize.

It’s hard then, to explain why I still have hope. I guess it’s because there is no alternative.

In Jay’s latest email, from just a few days ago, he expressed hope too, as he did when I visited him. He has an appeal coming up on Jan. 29 in Richmond, Va. and he has a strong case.

“Less than 25 percent of cases get oral arguments and go to direct appeal,” he wrote to me via CorrLinks. That alone is a good sign, and we’re hoping that the worst-case scenario is a new trial. Best case is that he walks.

There’s even a plan for when Jay is set free: I’ll drive up there with a few of our mutual friends and pick him up, but we won’t tell his girls that he’s out. He wants to surprise them, maybe standing outside of school when they’re let out for the day or knocking on their mom’s door unexpectedly.

I’ve started to have those dreams again about him walking free, and this time they feel a little different. Closer.

I don’t have a sixth sense about it, like some people do in their knees when rain is coming. But Jay does, exuding confidence about the inevitability of his early release and a modicum of vindication in this nightmare. And just like it’s always been, it is his strength that sustains me and not the other way around.